You may want to pass this around to your doubting devotee friends because there is an
analogy here to the cover-up that is currently going on in the Sai Organization by,
unfortunately both men and women.

Once, in grade school, I was late, and afraid to go in and face the wrath of Sister
Hiltruda.

The charming Father Montgomery found me crying in the schoolyard and offered to bring me
in.

As I entered the classroom, holding his hand, I smiled triumphantly at a glowering Sister
Hiltruda. She would not be able to utter a cross word to me, or raise a ruler.

She and I both knew we were serfs in a feudal society where men made the rules and set the
tone.

As a Catholic and the daughter of a cop in Washington, I grew up caught in a triple play
of patriarchal cultures.

The church was run by men. The nation's capital was run by men. The law was run by men.

Gradually, grudgingly, Congress, the White House and the police began to allow women into
power. But the church hierarchy stubbornly persisted in its allergy to modernity,
remaining a men's club, shrouded in hoary mists and incense.

A monsoon of sickening stories lately illustrates how twisted societies become when women
are either never seen, dismissed as second-class citizens or occluded by testosterone: the
church subsidizing pedophilia; the Afghan warlords' resumption of pedophilia; the Taliban
obliteration of women; the brotherhood of Al Qaeda and Mohamed Atta's mysogynistic funeral
instructions; the implosion of the macho Enron Ponzi scheme; the repression of women, even
American servicewomen, by our allies the Saudis.

In Saudi Arabia Saturday, Dick Cheney did not press on human rights and democracy, as he
might have in China or North Korea. We want oil and we want Saddam.

At the same time, Saudi newspapers broke custom to criticize the religious police for
letting 15 little girls die in a school blaze in Mecca. The police  the Commission
for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice  stopped men who tried to rescue
the girls or open the school gates, telling them "it is sinful to approach" the
girls because they weren't wearing head scarves and abayas, the traditional robes, and
there could be no exposure of "females to male strangers."

So even as our vice president was wooing Crown Prince Abdullah to visit President Bush's
ranch in Crawford, the Saudi police were operating on the philosophy "Better a dead
girl than a bareheaded girl."

Societies built on special privileges  the all-male Saudi rulers, Catholic
priesthood and Taliban, and the boys' club running Enron  become far too invested in
preserving those privileges. They will never do the kind of soul-baring and housecleaning
that might raise questions about the kind of secret society that creates that kind of
privilege.

The church says priests must be male because Jesus' apostles were male. So should women
have stayed out of U.S. government because the founding fathers were male?

Celibacy is not church doctrine but a tradition from the Middle Ages. By that logic,
hospitals would still be using leeches.

It may be a news flash to the Vatican, but it's been clear for years that the church is in
a time warp, arrested in its psychosexual development. The vow of celibacy became a magnet
for men trying to flee carnal impulses they found troubling. In some cases this meant
homosexuality, in others pedophilia.

The last happy, hetero, celibate parish was run by Barry Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby. (Or
was it?)

We all knew boys who were pounced on in the rectory by priests. On a road trip to the
beach, my brother and his friends had to play "pink belly" with a priest 
pulling down their pants and slapping their stomachs until they turned pink.

While teaching us not to lie or cheat, the church simply covered up its own sins,
recycling abusive priests and putting parish after parish of children at risk, paying off
victims and demanding their silence, refusing to admit that sexually assaulting children
was a destructive crime and not merely a moment of moral weakness.

The church was hoist on its own ritual. The age of confession moved from the little box to
the TV box, and victims began to feel free to unearth their buried pain.

We have turned a light on these cloistered, arrogant fraternities and they can no longer
justify themselves. Their indulgences, conducted in secret, have hurt the welfare of their
most vulnerable charges.